Part 4: Testy, TrBe - Four

Testy has found himself in a very bad spot, staring down a pack of Yaks and a... Skeleton Man. Trog says to kill them all, and I'm inclined to agree, but lets weigh our options first. It seems like we're in the corner of this level, but they could be two very close rooms. We fell down 3 DL's so it's reasonable to assume we're about 3 XL's lower than we should be for these enemies. I actually fought a pack of Yaks when going to d:11 but it was one at a time and they still were a decent challenge, so I can almost guarantee the 3 that we see will require berserking. But what's this skeleton warrior? We can right-click on an enemy to see some details about them, so we do so and I'd love to show that screen, but apparently the screenshot program wont take shots of that, just the area in-game. I dunno.

The game gives us a line about skeleton warriors, saying they're “vicious and heavily armed,” not a phrase I like to hear about enemies. The game also considers it extremely dangerous for us. That line gets updated as you get stronger, so eventually we would see “it looks easy.” For the record, the game says Yaks look dangerous to us. But player knowledge helps us out here, skeleton warriors almost always come in packs of 4+ and have powerful necromantic abilities so even if we kill the yaks, they might will get raised back by their undead cohorts. Yak zombies aren't nearly as hard as yaks, but we don't want to waste resources fighting what we can't when we're this thick in the weeds. I do have two outs, brothers in arms and scrolls. BiA is at 6% failure as it's based on piety and we've got 9 different types of scrolls unidentified. First I want to move one space down and to the left to see if we're cornered or not, then I want to decide on fight or flight.



Cornered. Now the only flight option is in scrolls that I've not identified and BiA is looking pretty good. I spend a turn or two throwing flame from the “double fireball” wand that we picked up from the imp (called a wand of fire, it's the second tier of fire spell wands, casting a spell called bolt of fire.) This kills one of the yaks, and he's kind enough not to leave a corpse for the skeleton warrior to resurrect.
The first yak is upon us and a basilisk skeleton also joins the fray. Basilisk skeletons aren't all that hard, but they do have quite a few hitpoints. The ankus is a weapon, they can be decent but they're so rare I'm shocked to find one.



Two BiA's later, we've two berserk ogre allies and only stand to be in melee with one yak, a good prospect. Further, by moving down towards the corner we've reduced the chance the skeleton warriors buddies will come to fight us too.



We hit level 11 as the skeleton warrior finished off a weakened ogre. A few rounds later things look like this:



Close call, and had his buddies been there, we'd have felt a world of hurt. I didn't berserk in that fight because we're in a dangerous spot and I want to hold on to that particular out. Another skeleton warrior appears and this time I do berserk, they can do surprising damage when in melee with them, a scary proposition when I'm at half health. I rest up, grab the ankus as souvenir and search out an up-stairs.



Wow, I'm really dumb. The scroll next to the skeleton warrior is a teleport scroll, which means we've got those identified and we have none. Had I tried to escape I'd probably have died looking for one. Another skeletal warrior who we pull down and kill.



Or not! I underestimated this one and have fallen prey to my own hubris. This was an easily avoidable death, and a good start to the LP, I suppose. I should have used brothers in arms to kill him, but because I just killed one I figured “hey, no problem, I 'll just berserk and maim him.” Death recap screens show us our inventory:





The scrolls weren't going to be much help, but I didn't use my wands which would've killed him (fireball!)



This is our morgue, showing whether we died or won the game, how many points we got in that game and ranking us locally with all other characters we had on this save. Testy was my first attempt on a clean, new .10 save. Of note: that skeleton did 20 damage in one swing, seriously don't fuck around with those guys. The game is listed as nearly two hours because I do my write-ups simultaneous with my playing (qhich means I wrote the "...and kill" line right before actually fighting him.) Still, nearly 10K points isn't half bad. TrBe is a fun race/class that rewards good play rather than punishes poor play.

Sometimes you get a +5 ring of Strength on d:1 and other times you fall down a shaft three levels before hitting the lair. Future characters will move through the dungeon faster and I'll spend less time on basic tactics, but that's where most players flounder so I figured it'd be a good start. Now I'll open the floor to other players and let you folks vote on what I play next. Which means showing the whole list of races and classes, I suppose.





Don't worry about the darker gray choices (chaos knight and wanderer,) you can still be those. If you don't know what something is, vote for it! I'd be glad to answer questions about races/classes, but it seems like most of you are pretty familiar with the game.



Argh, I should not have died there.